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Last year, Detention Watch Network launched its first organizing campaign for Dignity not Detention, which calls for the restoration of fundamental human rights and due process in the U.S. immigration detention and deportation system.

During its first year, the campaign supported organizing at local sites in Arizona, Texas and Georgia to demand an end to rampant human rights violations in the immigration detention system and to stop local detention expansion, and engaged members in complementary education and advocacy efforts at the national level. Through the campaign hundreds of individuals around the country have participated in activities that put the spotlight on the expansion of enforcement actions, how these actions are driving the growth of the detention system and the government’s systemic failure to protect basic human rights and due process.

Beginning Fall 2011, the Dignity not Detention Campaign is rolling out a national organizing strategy focused on the repeal of mandatory detention. Contrary to international human rights standards, our government’s mandatory detention policies require whole categories of people to be imprisoned without any individualized judicial assessment of their risk to public safety or flight or of their vulnerability in detention while the government makes its decision whether to deport them.

Mandatory detention is a driving force behind the rapid expansion of immigration detention: already over 200,000 immigrants are impacted by mandatory detention each year. The increasing numbers of people subject to mandatory detention are creating pressure to add more beds to the system which benefits private prison corporations and those invested in for-profit incarceration while separating families and sowing fear in communities across the country.

In order to restore due process to the immigration system, mandatory detention must be repealed. Join the Dignity not Detention Campaign to Repeal Mandatory Detention. Endorse the campaign here.

Without the repeal of mandatory detention laws, immigrants will never have a fair opportunity to pursue their right to live in the U.S. and stay with their families and communities.